me to accumulate a store of ungracious and slovenly memories....

All our conceptions of life differed. I remember how we differed about
furniture. We spent three or four days in Tottenham Court Road, and she
chose the things she fancied with an inexorable resolution,--sweeping
aside my suggestions with--"Oh, YOU want such queer things." She pursued
some limited, clearly seen and experienced ideal--that excluded all
other possibilities. Over every mantel was a mirror that was draped, our
sideboard was wonderfully good and splendid with beveled glass, we had
lamps on long metal stalks and cozy corners and plants in grog-tubs.
Smithie approved it all. There wasn't a place where one could sit and
read in the whole house. My books went upon shelves in the dining-room
recess. And we had a piano though Marion's playing was at an elementary
level.

You know, it was the cruelest luck for Marion that I, with my
restlessness, my scepticism, my constantly developing ideas, had
insisted on marriage with her. She had no faculty of growth or change;
she had taken her mould, she had set in the limited ideas of her
peculiar class. She preserved her conception of what was right in
drawing-room chairs and in marriage ceremonial and in every relation of
life with a simple and luminous honesty and conviction, with an immense
unimaginative inflexibility--as a tailor-bird builds its nest or a
beaver makes its dam.

Let me hasten over this history of disappointments and separation. I
might tell of waxings and waning of love between us, but the whole was
waning. Sometimes she would do things for me, make me a tie or a pair
of slippers, and fill me with none the less gratitude because the things
were absurd. She ran our home and our one servant with a hard, bright